Rubies from Burma

by Anne Lovett

  Nobody messes with my stuff, he said.

  Why do you keep all that junk? That old army footlocker, for instance. It’s just bad memories. That awful thing you have—

  You have the rest of the house, he said.

  That’s what’s wrong with you, Duke! You ought to trash it all. The pictures, the souvenirs. Then maybe you could forget.

  Leave me alone, Ava. Just leave me alone.

  You leave me alone too much, she said. You talk to Elzuma.

  Don’t start.

  You like that old woman better than me.

  Jesus. God. Please just shut up.

  I hate it here! I wish I’d never married you! She burst into sobs and turned back toward the house, and I slipped back into my room just as she stormed through the door into the kitchen. Out my window, I watched Duke stride out into the yard and light a cigarette, taking deep drags, and it looked like his hands were shaking.

  That afternoon, while he was out tending the cattle and Ava was out back hanging out clothes, I slipped into his office, curious about what awful thing he had, what they were fighting about.

  I opened the closet door. The shelves were stuffed with boxes of papers, mainly, but on the floor was an olive-drab army footlocker. I tried the top, but it was locked. I heard Ava calling me and went back to the pantry, where I was supposed to be cleaning.

  Momma didn’t get out of the hospital that week. We went to see her every day, and she didn’t look good. The exercises they were giving her were just tiring her out, and the medicines weren’t helping much.

  The nights were hot and I found it hard to fall asleep, even with a new fan. There were no more owls that I knew weren’t owls, but I wanted Momma to hurry up and get well and let me out of this house of smoke and mirrors.

  When the first day of school came, Momma was still there. Hurry up with those dishes, Ava said, checking her lipstick in the side of the toaster. What a pain, having to carry you to school.

  A small price to pay for all this work I do around here, I said, hands deep in suds. I took a plate out and plunged it into the rinse water. Another month and I could get a driver’s license, but please, dear God, let me be home by then.

  Duke was still in the kitchen, jotting down supplies he needed to order. We need to take your momma’s car to the shop to get it checked out, he said. Make sure the brakes are good before you get out there by yourself.

  Chap used to fix it himself, I blurted.

  We’ll take it to the shop soon, Ava said. When Duke has time to help drive. But not today.

  Sure, I said. A pang of grief for Chap, sharp as a knife, stuck in my gullet.

  Be outside in fifteen minutes, Ava said, and walked out. Duke went out to the barn. I finished the dishes and took the pan of scraps out to the hounds. Francis, the mule, stood in the paddock flicking his ears, looking my way for a treat. Suddenly, he perked to attention.

  Duke was coming around the barn on Nimrod, and I caught my breath. How splendid he looked, his black Western hat playing off the horse’s black coat and white blaze, backlit against the morning sunlight. Duke on his horse was Duke before the war.

  I stood there transfixed, watching him, and dimly heard the honking out front. At that moment Duke saw me and tipped his cowboy hat. Ecstatic, I dashed toward the house to get my books. That was a picture I wanted to hold in my mind.

  During the five-mile drive, I expected Ava to light into me, but she was quiet, not even asking me if I’d hosed out the dog pan. Now that the closet’s clean, are you going to finish the guest room, I asked, just to fill the empty space of her silence.

  You planning on moving in? She stepped on the gas and the trees went whizzing by in a cool morning scent of pine.

  Of course not. Nothing’s going to happen to Momma.

  We didn’t make a lot of money this year, she said. God, I hate it out there. I didn’t sign up for this.

  You ought to be thankful, I said. Duke is a good man.

  You can have him, she snapped.

  My cheeks burned. Wash your mouth out with soap, I said.

  You don’t know the half of it, girl.

  Half of what?

  I lied. I have been lying to you all. It’s hell living with him. He has nightmares from the war. Wakes up shaking, sometimes yelling, sweating. Then he gets up and smokes, stares out.

  Not a screech owl, I said.

  No.

  Goes and talks to Elzuma, she said. Rides down to the swamp.

  All those acres and nowhere to hide, I murmured.

  Ava didn’t hear me. What?

  Nothing. I wish I was back home, I said.

  Ava just looked at me. I could tell she was thinking she wished I was too, and wasn’t going to give me the satisfaction of hearing her say it. She pulled up in front of the school. I’ll pick you up this afternoon, she said. She looked around at the crowd of kids with interest. Which one is Glenn?

  Shut up, I said, and hurried out of the car, slamming the door behind me. I had made the bad mistake of mentioning Glenn’s name and she immediately figured out I had a bad crush.

  I threaded my way through the throng into the hall. Velda Rafferty, who’d first told me about how it was between boys and girls, sashayed by in a tight pink sweater, though the weather would be too warm for sweaters by noon.

  I felt something poking me in the back and I turned to see Starrett Conable with a pencil eraser in jabbing position. How’s your momma? he said, sticking the pencil behind his ear.

  I shrugged. About the same, I said, and kept walking. He walked on beside me.

  I saw that good-looking sister of yours bring you, he said.

  I hope you got a good look, I said.

  She wear those rubies a lot?

  Why not? Duke brought them back for her.

  There’s a story going around, he said. People said he killed somebody for those rubies.

  I opened my mouth to say he would never do a thing like that, but then I thought about what Ava had just told me and the words died on my lips.

  Here’s my homeroom, I said.

  Just then Glenn Dorris came up with Cathy Kelvey, the new girl at school—short and bouncy and giggly, with honey-blond hair. She’s going to make a hell of a cheerleader, Starrett said with admiration.

  Just what is it about cheerleaders? I said. I wouldn’t be one if you paid me.

  Starrett looked at me looking at Glenn and Cathy. So that’s how it is, he said.

  What do you mean? I said.

  Hey, Glenn, come over here. Mae Lee wants to talk to you, he said.

  Huh? Glenn said, looking blank.

  I do not! I said, face flaming, and turned to go into the room. I’ll get you, turd, I said under my breath.

  The last thing I heard before the bell rang was Starrett Conable snickering.

  When school was out, I sailed right on by Starrett, nose in the air, and hurried down the front steps expecting the white Caddy. What I saw instead was Duke’s truck at the curb, Duke smoking, curls drifting out the window. I walked over and grabbed the hot door handle. Ava too lazy to come herself? I asked, clambering in, hitching myself onto the high seat. I whapped my books on the floor and sighed. I’m glad this day is over, I began, and then I saw his face.

  Mae Lee, he said. He took my hand and patted it clumsily. Ava’s at the hospital.

  I looked at him and no words would come.

  It’s bad, he said. She had another stroke.

  He turned the key in the ignition and started the truck. He drove the few blocks from the school to the hospital and pulled into the sandy lot behind it, under the pecan trees. The other cars there looked dusty and sad and tired, cars of people who lived on hog meat and hope.

  He parked and stopped the engine. She’s in a coma, he said. It’s a matter of time.

  He held out his arms to catch me as I collapsed into them. I never should have let her go out to hang that wash but she wanted to, I said.

  It’s not your fault he said. It’
s not. I shuddered and buried my face in his wooly jacket that smelled of mules and tobacco smoke. He stroked my back. Hush, now. Ava’s feeling pretty bad. She wished she could have done more to help.

  Sure, I said bitterly. Ava never did anything she didn’t want to. And she had been there to tell her goodbye instead of me.

  Duke released me and tipped my chin up. I know you’re having a hard time, he said. You can still tell her goodbye. She’ll know you’re there. Be strong. He leaned over and kissed my cheek.

  He got out of the truck, came around to my side, opened the door, and helped me out as if I might be made of spider webs and glass. He held my hand all the way into the hospital, and then the chlorine blood smell hit me again. We walked down the hall and I had this foolish hope that things would be as always, that when we pushed open the door she would light up, happy to see us.

  But what happened was that Ava came up and gave me a hug. Why didn’t you come get me sooner? I said.

  There was no time, she said. She looked away.

  I sat on the edge of the bed and held Momma’s hand. Her eyes were closed and she breathed in and out, in and out. Momma, I said. Momma. Her eyelids flickered and her mouth moved, but no sound came out. Momma, it’s Mae Lee. I’m here.

  Look what your folks sent, I heard Ava saying to Duke, and I glanced at the vase of yellow roses.

  The new Methodist minister at John Wesley stopped by and prayed with us, and I was glad he had come. After he left, Duke and Ava and I sat quietly while the dappled light danced through the venetian blinds as the tree limbs swayed, heavy with pecans. In a few months the pecans would lie on the ground, husks like black tulips against the sky, and I would be all alone.

  Duke laid his hand on my shoulder and told us he’d leave Ava and me alone for a little while, and that he’d be back. The waiting stretched across the afternoon hours, lengthening like the green shadows on the wall, and by the time Duke returned, the sun was sinking behind the pecan trees in a blaze of fiery orange. Momma made a little choking sound, and I took her fingers. They gripped, then, harder. I looked up at Ava and she took Momma’s other hand.

  The pale eyes blinked open, and she looked from one of us to the other. Love each other, she whispered, and then looked up in the air. I’m ready, Jesus. She coughed and jerked, and a rattle sounded in her throat. Her hand grew limp and I clutched it harder, willing the life back into it, but it did not respond.

  Then I felt a warm wind passing, and Ava was sobbing and pressing the bell and Duke ran into the hall shouting. I finally let go of her lifeless hand.

  Chapter Eighteen

  People deal with death in different ways, and now I understand what I didn’t then, about Ava and Duke after the funeral.

  I felt Momma’s spirit all around us, when we were making plans, almost as if she was telling us what to do. I felt that she wanted Brother Ben Higgins who was here so many years ago to come from Augusta, where he was pastoring a big church, to speak over her. At the time I suspected Ava just wanted somebody important.

  But when I saw Momma cold and dead in her casket, on that white satin, I felt that it could not be her, that it was not my momma in that casket. My momma would have no truck with being dead. She still had too much to do—to see me go to college, to see her first grandchild, to hug me goodnight before bed. How could she go off and leave us?

  But she had, and the church was filled with people to tell her good-bye. All the students she had taught all those years were there, and my grandmother Mimi, willing herself to be strong. It is not a fitting thing, she said, for the child to go before the parent, as if admonishing God. Mr. Linley, my step-grandfather, did not come to the funeral, because he was already weak from the disease that would kill him before too much longer.

  Ava set a black straw hat with a face veil on her hair, and I wore a black suit and little black crescent hat that Aunt Talley got me from somewhere. Ava arranged for a spray of white carnations, lilies, roses, and ferns for Momma’s mahogany coffin that Duke’s folks had paid for, as well as the rest of the funeral. At the cemetery, remembering what Momma had said about sweet shrub being not showy but mysteriously beautiful with its scent, my tears fell when I worked a couple of branches in when no one was looking.

  Starrett Conable came over and took my damp hand. And I let him hold it, for just a little while, and he walked me back to the car. He gave me a hug before he opened the door for me to get in, and I gave him a sad little wave when we drove off.

  After the funeral, I was back at the farmhouse to stay. I could not go to Mimi’s house, not with Mr. Linley so unwell. I was confused and my tummy was tight. I didn’t want to be there with Ava telling me what to do all the time, but I did want to be there with Duke and the horses to comfort me.

  That night after we’d put Momma in the ground next to Chap, her name already carved on the double headstone, I lay awake in my bed until the moon rose high about the tops of the pines. Still numb with it all, I could not believe she was gone.

  I wondered if Ava was awake and felt a strange yearning to talk with her, to be close like we had never been, so far apart in age. Maybe she’d be missing Momma too. I slid to the cool planks, wrapped my robe around me, and padded down to their closed door.

  I raised my hand to knock and then heard a moan. I froze, and then heard the squealing of bedsprings. Oh God, baby. Harder, harder. That was Ava, then a keening, a wailing, a groan, and then a laughing hiccup.

  Ava, Ava, Duke said. Oh, Ava.

  My face hot as summer sand, I wanted to run away, wanted to cover my ears, but I didn’t. I stayed until the sounds had died into a soft murmuring.

  In the following months, after all the lights were off and the house was still and the moon made a shining crossbar on the ivory carpet of the living room, I would sometimes wander from my bedroom and lie on the sofa in the living room.

  Sometimes I heard sounds coming from the bedroom at the end of the hall. Sometimes they were loud, and sometimes they were soft; sometimes there were moans and sometimes cries, and sometimes the sharp sounds of slapping, or growling, or panting, or soft wet sounds like the lapping of the lake on the shore, which made me feel like jellyfish were swimming inside my belly. I learned the music of the springs, their metallic swing beating out a rhythm of slow and staccato bursts that faded to a random sigh. I heard all these sounds and then softly stepped back to my bedroom to form pictures in my mind where it was me, and not Ava, floating in the lake of dreams.

  And there were nights when he did not go to bed, but sat alone in his office and drank, and nights when he went to bed and there were no sounds at all. And those nights were coming one after another now, in an unbroken procession of silence.

  On the farm, life went on, but with different patterns, as though a kaleidoscope had turned, the shiny colored glass rearranging in new and unfamiliar ways. Sometimes it seemed a deep river of cloudy water ran between me and the light. All I knew was to keep swimming.

  With Momma gone, I had no grownup I could confide in. Ava, who had flitted through school like a dragonfly, breaking rule after rule and never getting caught, was not likely to understand. It seemed to me that Duke, with his long silences and his faraway looks, might be just as lonely as I was. I always hoped he and I might go out on the horses together, as we used to, but he was always working and I was always studying or doing chores. He belonged only in my dream world.

  When Elzuma came back from Macon, we talked about Momma. Can she hear me? I asked. Does she know what I’m doing? Can she talk to Jesus? Is she with Chap?

  Chile, she ain’t settled into being dead yet. You got to give her time. Then maybe she gone listen to you. Elzuma ignored my other questions.

  I felt her spirit go past me, I said.

  Elzuma nodded. That do happen.

  What can I do?

  Jes’ let yourself grieve, honey. Get all the sadness out, pour it all on the earth.

  I started writing poems, that is, in between scrubbing the fl
oor, feeding the chickens, and helping with the laundry. My English teacher saw some of them and told me I should send them out for publication. But my poems were about me, not about mythology or deep thoughts like Leda and the Swan or Ozymandias or The Rime of the Ancient Mariner. All I knew of poets were that they were usually dead before they became famous.

  My teacher showed me what she called little magazines, full of poems and stories. She told me there were places that looked for young poets, and that I shouldn’t be afraid to put my feelings on paper, or be afraid of writing bad poems. She said that sometimes we have to get the bad poems out before we can get to the good. She let me come by after school one day a week for extra help, when I could get a ride home with Lindy, and I began to feel my way toward the light.

  Ava got it into her head that I was wasting my time with “that stupid poetry,” and said there were chores for me at the farm. After all, she maintained, they were feeding me and paying my bills. Momma had left me her car and her meager savings and her wedding ring and her good necklace to help send me to college—she did leave Ava all the furniture in the little rented house—and Ava felt this was mighty unfair. Duke’s family had paid for the funeral.

  I still wrote poems whether Ava liked it or not. I wrote poems about the light on the broomsedge and the cows by the pond, their hooves scalloping the mud, and the horses—oh yes, the horses—and the glint of light behind Duke’s hat (I didn’t show that to anyone). I wrote about the frosty breath in winter and the yellow forsythias in the spring and the firethorn berries outside the house, of the late beautiful Hardy Pritchard, and I wrote about his hair and his dead feet, and the rosary and how I prayed, and I even wrote a poem for Ava.

  I couldn’t write poems about Momma. I wasn’t ready yet.

  I drove Momma’s old car to school, and sometimes I would give Lindy Yarbrough a ride home, since she only lived a mile or so down the road. Since she’d gotten serious about riding, we didn’t see each other as much, and she was always full of news about this show or that show or what ribbon she’d won.

  When we crested the rise right before her place, I heard a terrific boom and saw a plume of smoke and my heart squeezed with fear. Good grief, Lindy, what’s happening?